The National Development Council (NDC) will soon present a road map for Taiwan to achieve net-zero emissions, the head of the council Kung Ming-hsin told lawmakers.
At a legislative hearing, Mr Kung said the proposal for reaching net-zero emissions by 2050 would be made public by the end of March and would lay out the country’s future energy mix, according to a report by Central News Agency.
It would also include proposals for revising laws and regulations to facilitate efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and measures to promote new technologies, such as electric vehicles, he said.
Last year, President Tsai Ing-wen pledged that the Taiwanese government would draw up a road map toward net-zero emissions in 2022 so as to provide guidelines to government agencies as well as the private sector.
The government had planned for renewable energy to account for 20% of Taiwan’s electricity supply by 2025, though those plans have fallen behind schedule.
Other options floated by the NDC included seeking international cooperation on the development of hydrogen energy and carbon capture and storage technology.
The council said it has been in talks with industry representatives on the promotion of decarbonised energy systems, higher energy efficiency in various industries, green transportation and negative emission technologies.
Though the 2050 goal of net-zero emissions has been widely adopted, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) latest report on climate change issued at the end of February painted an extremely grim picture of the future and said more urgency was needed now. A